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Monday, September 1, 2008

34 .Friendfeed Take 2 - the beta version

Bobbi mentioned the existence of a very cool lifestreaming application a while back called FriendFeed. Just last week, the fine folks behind this service released a "beta" (meaning not quite ready for everyone to use it) version of the new look/feel/features of the FriendFeed site and it is pretty amazing! You can now create lists and populate them with friends, work contacts, professional contacts or anything else you'd like and just view the feeds from the folks on a single list at one time. This is a great way to keep from being overwhelmed with information from your friends, collegues and co-workers all in the same "lifestream".Also related to the friends lists, is a feature that wasn't advertised on the blog... It's called Fake Following. An excerpt from the TechCrunch post talking about the new feature says:

The Friend Lists also support “Fake Following” - a seemingly unintuitive feature that allows users to look like they’re following their friends without actually getting their updates. Users often expect to have their “Follows” reciprocated by their peers, and a failure to do so can lead to bruised egos. But indiscriminate following comes with a price too, as it ultimately leads to an unmanageable amount of noise (and stories you might not care about). Fake Following manages to skirt the issue with a digital white lie, and is a feature Twitter (which has a similar system) should offer too.

They have also improved the posting interface to allow easy posting of photos directly to FriendFeed. You can now post information about your life and include visual aids! They reworked the navigation to make FriendFeed rooms easier to find and manage - a nice touch to make getting around the site even easier. Finally (so far), they've also given us the ability to see another person's entire lifestream - their postings and all of their friends postings together - so that you can get a feel for what a particular person enjoys and/or finds interesting.While the last option may seem to raise FriendFeed into the realm of a totally easy stalking tool, it also gives you a good bit of insight into your friends and allows you to find other friends very easily.You can check out the new version by going to http://beta.friendfeed.com before it goes out, live, to all of the FriendFeed users. For those of you who decided not to join because it seemed too "noisy", you might want to take a second look - this new version is custom-made to make your FriendFeed experience as noisy or quiet as you want it to be!

"Lifestreaming" if only it was this easy to stream-line life! I'm not sure what to think of the "fake following." I understand not wanting to hurt someone's feelings but what happens when you actually talk to them in person or on the phone and they think your up on everything in their life and want your opinion on something. You could be up a major creek.

I can see and understand why this is helpful for people such as Bobbi or Robin, but I don't think I would use this due to I'm not into the blogging or reading blogs, or facebook, etc. But it seems helpful!

I'm laughing at the concept behind the ability to "fake follow." It's right in line with false personal advertising in chat rooms. But, as Marion wrote, in face-to-face situations, this could get you in much hot water.

This streamlining is great if you you do a lot of social networking, and the fake traking, It's like one of the other lessons, if someone thinks you need to know they'll tell you, if you don't read it.

H'mm I've noticed what I think is a similar function on Facebook - where you can indicate that you want less updates or newsfeeds from specific friends. So if someone updates what they're doing more frequently than you care to find out about, I guess you opt in for this function.